Google Photos (Thing 8)

I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot with the blogs for this week, but I guess that makes sense since the week is all about Google. I tried all of the steps in the Google Photos process, and I felt uncomfortable turning on the "sync" feature since that automatically saves the photos from my iPad to the cloud. I've never really trusted the cloud to actually back up my stuff and not have it accessible to strangers. Now, these photos we're talking about are for classroom use, so they're pictures of writing process posters and advisory team-building activities: nothing too exciting. However, I just want to make sure that everything is secure and saved, and I'm not sure what will get me to actually believe that!

The how-to videos were very helpful (I loved "Zootopia"), so I felt like I knew what I was doing once I started to download and play around with the app. Once I backed up and synced my photos, which took longer than I thought it would but did eventually finish, I took a small chance by deleting the ones that I didn't mind getting lost. I checked my pictures in Google Photos right after deleting them, and the vocabulary flash cards were still there - hooray! 

One thing I really like about the app is how easy it is to edit and filter the photos. I've never used a "real" camera that you have to adjust, just disposable cameras at camp and digital cameras for school before we got iPads, but I do love my phone camera and everything it can do. Basically, I want a camera that will call and text people. The filters DO remind me of Instagram, like the "Google Photos hands-on" video guy said, and I liked playing with all of the features.  Here's the spine label poem that I did with my students this year:

  Here's the one that I used the Mars filter on and made more saturated:

And for those of you who are interested in more spine label poetry, here are some student examples and here are some of Book Riot's favorites. I am lucky enough to have a resource center director who loves to work with my students, and this is one of our favorite activities! (Bonus: the kids get to practice working with the cataloguing system when they reshelve. :))

One thing that I have realized in the uploading of these photos is that I really hate not having a desktop to drag things to on the Chromebook! My laptop desktop does get really crowded since I am a serial dragger of things onto it, so NOT having that probably would help me stay more organized, but I couldn't figure out how to share the photo without following the link and then downloading it on the the desktop. I know I can upload a photo into this blog by putting in the URL of the photo from Google Photos, but for some reason, it wouldn't recognize the photo as public. I thought I did that correctly, but I guess not. For the purpose of this blog, I just worked around it by using my laptop, but I have to figure out why I thought I made it public and didn't. When I look at the photo permissions, it does say that everyone with the link can see it, but when I follow the link, it's the unfiltered photo. The mystery deepens.

The next thing I did with the Assistant in Google Photos was create an animation from the photos that I already had (gingerbread houses from this winter in advisory). I know people really like this feature, and it was cool to see, but I can't envision a scenario in which I would need that feature. It was fun to practice with but probably not something that I would do again.

However, the video I made from the pictures and video that I took with my iPad was one of my favorite things I've done in this course so far. (These are from some of the games the kids play at Adventures.) When I started this entry, I was annoyed at myself for leaving my iPad at school, but then I remembered that Google Photos saves across my devices - yay! The video was super easy to make; I've never really mastered video editing in other programs, but this came together very quickly. I love how you can use photos AND video in the same video; I like the music that comes with the app; I like the different filters and effects. I also like that I have the option to import my own music - I think that if I wanted to spend some time mastering how to do this, I could make some pretty decent videos. For example, I could learning to get rid of the black lines on each side - is that just because of the way I held the iPad when I took the pictures and videos? 

I can think of several uses for Google Photos in the classroom. For advisory, we do some activities where the kids go around the school and take pictures of things. For example, when we talk about the 4 Rs of advisory (resilience, reflection, responsibility, and relationships) we'll have them go find examples of these concepts and take photos of them, then share with the class. In the past, I've had the kids email them all to me, which means I'll get a bunch of emails and then have to download and save them to a folder that I create. With Google Photos, they could just share them with me and also be able to edit them and create videos or animations in the same app. Here's the assignment itself (assignment credit to Tracy Silverman). For English, there may be possibilities here for creating booktalks since kids have the option to include the original audio in their Google videos - they could take pictures or video of scenes from the books and narrate over them. Again, I haven't dug too deep into the editing features, but it seems like it would work.

I don't know how applicable this app would be for sharing with parents; when I've tried to use Google apps in the past, the problem that I encountered was that not everyone had a Gmail address, so not everyone could view or edit the document. I suppose I could create a shareable link for photos, but I think I'm doing something wrong with that because I can't upload images or videos to this blog via those links. Maybe I need to check the privacy settings. It would be cool to have a shared folder for advisory activities like Field Day or class activities like Civil War Day (as long as the parents are okay with their kids' pictures being shared).

I think Google Photos has an important place in an increasingly digital and visual world, and I'll probably try to incorporate it into my classroom next year. It's easy and fun and I think the kids would like it...and have probably worked with it much more than I have already!